NVIDIA just released a new and faster way of rendering with OpenGL, called Bindless Graphics. Bindless Graphics are changes to OpenGL that can enable close to an order of magnitude improvement in the CPU-limitedness of graphics applications. Recent improvements in programmability have focused on additional flexibility in shaders (expanding formats to include more float and integer types, better branching support, etc.) and enabling new features (geometry programs, transform feedback, etc), and while some of these allow offloading parts of certain workloads to the GPU, they don’t directly attack the issues that dominate CPU time.